Premiums to entice a consumer to purchase a product have been used for many years. Inexpensive toys of one form or another have been put in cereal boxes and boxes of caramel corn to encourage young children, or parents of young children, to purchase a particular brand of cereal or snack.
Packaging labels which include materials of value of interest to more mature consumers are also known in the art. Typically, such materials include coupons, mail-in rebates, sweepstakes entry forms, product literature or related product information. Such materials are typically delivered by multi-panel labels, expanded content labels or expanded content labels affixed to a product package.
There is more to marketing, however, than simply enticing a purchaser by offering free premiums. Retailers and manufacturers increasingly seek information from consumers about the products consumers buy, and the reasons consumers like or dislike certain products, as a way of improving a product or its marketing methods. Such information is typically obtained through surveys. In some cases, a survey is done by personally interviewing consumers about their purchases and preferences. This type of survey is usually done right at a retail outlet. To be effective, the interviews must be done by experienced survey takers. This type of survey is clearly very expensive to conduct.
To cut costs, manufacturers and retailers have resorted to the use of sweepstakes entry forms or rebate coupons to elicit survey data from consumers once a purchase is made. This type of survey is less expensive than one which requires personal interviews, but nonetheless has drawbacks of its own. This type of survey is inefficient due to the historically low redemption rate, typically less than 10 percent, of such forms or coupons.
Moreover, for surveys of this type to be meaningful, the survey itself should not distort the responses. Deliberate purchasing enticements skew the survey data results. A company that wishes to understand the profile of its customers prefers to discover who is purchasing its products, absent any deliberate enticement to do so. Therefore, it is usually desirable when attempting to collect survey results via product purchasing to obscure the fact that a valuable premium is attached to the product until after the customer has made the purchase.
The ability to obtain questionnaire data from customers in a manner that both elicits a response without necessarily enticing a purchase and is also adaptable to the myriad types of container and products available in retail stores remains a challenge in the art.
Accordingly, there is a need for a pre-approved incentive card delivery system that is adaptable to the myriad types of containers and products available in retail stores and that allows delivery of a pre-approved incentive card that requires a recipient to participate in a survey to redeem the premium via a stick-on label in such a manner that both draws customer attention to the presence of the card within the label while not explicitly revealing its presence in a retail store. Furthermore, there is a need for a label which can provide an incentive card in combination with necessary product labeling information even if the stick-on label covers up all or part of the product container's label. The present invention fills those needs.